NEWS

I hope you’ve all had a great end of the semester! It was great seeing many of you at induction only a few weeks ago, and I hope our new members are excited to be a part of IDR and get started helping us to grow and do more in the coming year! In fact, if you’re interested in being a bigger part of IDR, we’d love to have you run for office!

The officer positions available are:
President
Vice President of Membership
Vice President of Events
Treasurer
Secretary
Public Relations Chair
Visual Media Chair
Webmaster/Forums Chair
Social Spotlight Speaker Series Chair

The first five positions are a part of the Executive Board and must be filled. While the remaining positions don’t need to be filled, we would love to fill them so we have more people to help next year! I’ve attached a document with descriptions of each position, but if you have any further questions, please email me!

Please let me know by Thursday, May 24th if you would like to run for any position. We will then have a vote if necessary to determine who will fill each position. If you’re interested in being an officer but not sure what to go for or if you’re torn between more than one position, email me about that too! I’m happy to help you decide, or have you fill in where needed.

I really encourage you all to try for a position, even if you were only recently inducted. IDR is a growing group of amazing people and I’ve only ever had a positive experience as an officer. I have been Secretary for two years, VP of Membership for one year, and now President this past year and I’ve enjoyed all three positions immensely. I would be running again if I wasn’t planning to graduate!

Anyway, please let me know and thank you for reading through. Also, if you graduated this year (or previously), please respond to this email to let me know. This will NOT remove you from the list serv (unless you’d like to be), but will let us know if you are still an ‘active’ member on campus or not.

Good morning,
Please join us for the induction of our new members on Wednesday May 2nd at 5:00, in the GLC Room F. The program will run as follows:

5:00-5:15 Light refreshments and socialization with inductees and IDR members

5:15-6:30 Induction Ceremony

6:30-7:00 Socialization
Please mark your calendars! We are very excited about these new members and hope you will come and learn about their research and get to know them. Guest are welcome and please RSVP (not required).

GRAD 5134 Interdisciplinary Research is a graduate level class about collaboration across departments to solve a research problem. This Tuesday, the class is doing a communicating science workshop and it will end in a Mini-Nutshell Games (students have to give a 2 minute speech about their research to a general audience). Students are mainly from Civil & Environmental Engineering. We’re trying to get an audience together for this, and if you have 30-45 min free we really appreciate if you can come by! This will be a great opportunity for you to access interdisciplinary research and learn to communicate with scientists outside your home department!

When: Tuesday 4/10 3pm
Where: Graduate Life Center Room C
What: Come be an audience for great researches!
How: Just come as you are, and feel free to spread the words and grab a friend or two!

If you are coming and/or sending a friend please let me know so I can have a head count.

Thanks and please don’t hesitate to reach out for questions or concerns!

The IDR officers will be at the event, promoting the society and checking out the many very cool presentations that will be happening! If you have any time that day and would be interested in helping us to man the IDR table and hand out flyers, we would really appreciate it! Simply email me (mck66@vt.edu) as soon as possible to let me know!

I hope you all had a great spring break and snow day! I wanted to email you about a few upcoming events and other notifications for IDR (sorry for the length, but bear with me and please read through)!

1. We are excited to announce our next Speaker Spotlight which will highlight Dr. Sharri Zamore who will give us a talk titled “From Science to Science Communication” on Wednesday March 21st at 10:30am in GLC room A. This talk is going to be really interesting and I highly recommend it. Dr. Zamore has studied many different disciplines, notably in science and engineering fields, but her true passion is science communication and how the public perceives what we, as researchers, do. There will be coffee and donuts at the event! I’ve attached the flyer and would really appreciate it if you could distribute to your listservs or anyone you think might be interested, this talk is open to all!

2. This year, we are a major sponsor at the Graduate Student Assembly Research Symposium (http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/graduatestudentassembly/what-we-can-offer-you/graduate-research-symposium/) on Wednesday, March 28th. We will be at the event, promoting interdisciplinarity and enjoying presentations by many of the students on their research here at VT. We will be awarding posters and talks based on interdisciplinarity as well. We encourage you all to try to take time to come see some of the amazing talks and poster presentations at the event. We will also be handing out flyers on membership as well as some IDR merchandise at the event! If you have even an hour or two and would like to help out, please email me (mck66@vt.edu) ASAP and we really appreciate the help!

3. Thank you to all of you who voted for the IDR Constitution amendments earlier this year. We successfully changed the IDR Consitution to include a new membership type! We are now accepting full graduate members, full undergraduate members, and associate members. If you’d like to read about the differences, please check out our website: http://www.idrsociety.org/membership/membership/ . Hopefully these changes will help us to broaden our membership to include more undergraduates interested and participating in interdisciplinary research!

4. Speaking of which, membership is currently OPEN and we are accepting spring applicants! PLEASE share this far and wide to everyone you know who might be interested. Visit http://www.idrsociety.org/membership/application/ to find the application packet and any other information you may need.

Thank you all and sorry again for the length of this! Please email me with any questions you may have and hope to see you all soon!